What Makes Teddy Run?

Our wish came true yesterday when a couple of buffoonish environmentalists were arrested in Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s office for demanding a meeting with the Senator and then refusing to leave as the office closed for the evening. (You know, none of us enjoys going through schedulers, but that’s what they’re there for.) Teddy Glick and his wife, Jane Califf, blame McConnell for the Senate’s failure to pass a 15 percent renewable fuels standard in the anti-energy bill. Man the barricades!

We know this kind of post gives the Glicks of the world the attention they crave, but there’s just one bit of posturing that sends us around the bend, an outlandish claim Glick is making that reporters are repeating unchallenged. This from the Louisville Courier-Journal:

Glick has been fasting since Sept. 4 to bring public attention to the renewable-fuels issue.

Making a veggie soup
in my kitchen
and I open
the refrigerator door,
see the cheese,
and feel a
Very
Strong
Longing
to eat.

Ted, eating a bowl of vegetable soup is what’s known as…EATING!

A 100-day fast has one result: Death by starvation. No human can survive that long without food. (One hunger-striking IRA prisoner in the Maze made it to 61 days before dying, another to 45.) If Glick wants to dramatize himself by lying about what he’s doing (that is, going on a liquid diet), well, he wouldn’t be the first.

But for reporters to regurgitate the obvious untruth without challenge…